Situations Where PPC is Better Than SEO

There are two most common (and effective) ways to bring visitors to your website—search engine optimisation, aka SEO, and pay-per-click, the PPC. Both SEO and PPC are useful components of your internet marketing strategy. And using both of them simultaneously can render excellent results. While SEO is free (as long as you do it on your own), there are some situations when it is logical to use PPC advertising instead.

SEO vs. PPC

PPC, the pay-per-click, is precisely what its name suggests—you pay for each click on your ad to the ad publisher. The most popular PPC ad publishers today are Google AdWords, Yahoo advertising, Bing Ads, and Facebook Atlas. Using a PPC model, you can get your ad (the link to your website) into the sponsored results section of the search engines whenever someone types in the keywords that you have set relating to your website or nature of business.

Search engine optimisation, in a nutshell, refers to the techniques that site owners (or SEO experts if site owners do not feel like doing it themselves) use to increase backlinks to their website so that it can improve its visibility or position in various search engines. SEO also includes optimising website’s web content, meta title, meta description, and HTML.

As per the studies, more than 80 percent of website traffic comes from different search engines. Therefore, getting your website into a conspicuous position where internet users will click it, whether through pair PPC advertising or free SEO, is very important to the success of your business.

Situations when pay-per-click model is the better choice

While you want to get as much traffic as possible through free SEO approaches, there are some situations when it is sensible to depend on PPC model. Here are those situations:

1. Choose PPC when you need quick results. It takes a lot of time to achieve good results through SEO techniques. If you need instant traffic to your website, however, PPC is the best resource. As soon as your PPC ad is set up, the search engines will display it, and internet users will start clicking it. If you are advertising an upcoming event or launching a new product, then PPC is the best method for gaining immediate web traffic.

2. Choose PPC when you want to get specific web traffic. PPC model enables you to display your ad only to people who fit your demographic criteria. You even have the options to target a certain age group, particular region, specific device, and even as per time of day and day of the week. If your business provides region-specific products and services, PPC is an ideal way to ensure your website is displayed to the right audience. Getting a few targeted visitors on your website is always better than getting hundreds of people who have no interest in what you are dealing.

3. Choose pay-per-click when you get a new website or if SEO proves ineffective. As mentioned in the first point, SEO takes a lot of time to achieve good results. Therefore, if you want instant results for your new website, PPC will prove as an excellent choice. Besides, there are some websites (mostly single page, responsive websites, which are in trend) that do not see any results despite continuous SEO efforts. For such websites too, PPC can help generate good web traffic.

4. Employ PPC when you are using a landing page or a squeeze page. A landing page lacks enough content, while in order for SEO to work, plenty of informative content is needed. Therefore, if you are using a landing page or squeeze page, PPC will be the best resort to gain more web traffic.

5. Choose PPC for the time-sensitive offers. A typical SEO campaign will not yield any results if you are promoting a time-limited product, service, or an event like a flash sale or end-of-season discount. Employ a PPC campaign to get web traffic to your offer instantly so that you can maximise on your time-limited offer. With PPC, you have the full flexibility—you can run the campaign for a few days or just for a few hours.

6. Use pay-per-click to get your website in the top of the search results. As per various studies, most internet users notice and click only the links in the top section of the search result when searching for something. You can employ PPC to list your website above organic search results and create an opportunity to receive more traffic.